the Schweigert dog was pretty damn good, i probably wouldn't notice much of a difference between that and the Dome Dog

Minnesota Twins, now with SPF30
Minnesota Twins - <3 me some blue & red M&M's

weak, I know

Was at the Twins Ft Myers game on Tuesday. Liriano dominated the Pirates b-squad! It was a lot of fun and Ft Myers beach is pretty nice too.

I went to the game yesterday.








^ Mauer hitting a homer - woot!

Beautiful pictures. Sooooo excited to see my first live game there!

That old school twins logo is sweet!

Carlos Gomez: 4/5, 2b, HR, 4R

I'm sure his UZR on the season is probably already +1r too...

Also stole a base!

Sigh, DYoung playing over Thome tonight. Surprising? No. Disappointing? Yes.

Why can't I watch the game? Anyone else having this problem?

So WTF is channel 10 and when exactly did it come on the air?

pretty lame that the first game of the year is not available in HD

wtf at this not being on ESPN2

The game was avaliable in HD. It was on MY29. 29.1 had the HD feed. I didn't find it until the 4th inning, but it was avaliable.

I had it in HD on Comcast in St Paul.

For a loss that was a pretty encouraging opening day. Solid outing by Neshek, DYoung pulling the ball out of the park and I thought Span/Young looked like a pretty decent pair in left/center.

The Twins gave that one away. Plenty of chances, had the bases loaded in the 7th and 8th and couldnt capatalize.

yeah, i agree that delmon looked good on both offense and defense. hopefully not a fluke

They weren't joking about Delmon losing weight. I'm not getting my hopes up too much but obviously it's encouraging that he showed some work ethic and should move better.

Pretty lame loss but it's a tough start to the season on the west coast so I'm not going to get too concerned.

It's hard to say whether he looked faster, but he didn't look completely lost. He almost looked smooth on that one running catch he made in left center.

Damn Mijares. What a piece. Hate him.

As for you people and your TV issues...I have comcast (comcast sucks x1000 ldo) but it was on my schedule in HD on 3 channels: ESPN2, FSN, FOX. The FSN broadcast turned out to be something else, but I still had it on 2 channels in HD. So um, what?

LOL manupod.

On my comcast it was listed on ESPN2HD, FSNHD and whatever FOX9HD is (channel 436), it was only on the Fox9HD one. So stupid, I missed like 3 pitches figuring out wtf was going on.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index...erdays-lineups

Interesting article, says the Twins lineup was the 2nd most optimal of any team's yesterday. The methodology (ignoring handedness) is pretty terrible though. I reran it using career vRHP splits (as an approximation of vR projection) and got the following:

Mauer, Morneau, Span, Kubel, Cuddyer, Hardy, Hudson, Young, Punto

It only bumps the difference between real and optimal to .072 runs. Thoughts on the above suggested lineup?

I don't know what a reasonable projection for Thome vs. RHP is this year. At around .350/.450 he becomes a .1r/game improvement over Young's projection offensively. If we assume Young and Kubel are similar defensively (which they have been in left historically), that's a pretty terrible move. If you assume Young is an average LF (a terrible assumption obviously), it probably becomes optimal, especially given Baker's extreme fly-balledness.

I should really just blog about this **** lol...

/edit also the optimal lineup assuming that Thome projection is supposedly:

Mauer, Morneau, Span, Kubel, Thome, Cuddyer, Hudson, Hardy, Punto

while i am myself a "liberal" lineup guy (i would definitely bat mauer leadoff), i think statistical lineup optimization is pretty worthless given how much lineups affect performance (an obvious example is walk rates).

I hope that May 15 or so Young/Thome platoon (with Thome at DH, Kubel in OF) if Young hasn't figured his game out.

And this is a massive brag (and slightly premature since I haven't seen the tickets yet) but the word on the street is Champions Club seats for the opener. Hot damn, as if I wasn't already excited!!